Читать книгу Castle of Water - Dane Huckelbridge, Dane Huckelbridge - Страница 15

8

There is, of course, one pressing question that deserves to be answered: Why wasn’t anyone searching for survivors? The answer is that they were. Barry was correct—alarms had been sounded when their plane failed to arrive, and rescue craft were indeed out trolling the seas. Unfortunately, they were looking in the wrong place. This was the direct consequence of an unfortunate addiction on the part of their pilot and of the fact that their smallish Cessna had been downed by a colossal bolt of lightning—one that deep-fried every radio circuit on board.

As for the pilot—a fifty-year-old Filipino divorcé of Spanish Principalía ancestry by the name of Marco “Ding Dong” Mercado—both his skills and his privileged social status were sharply negated on more than one occasion by his great thirst for a Manila rum known as Tanduay. In fact, it was a bottle of Tanduay White that had cost him his captain’s title five years before at Philippine Airlines, a bottle of Tanduay Dark that had severed his ties with a down-market Malaysian airline two years after that, and an entire case of Tanduay Añejo, consumed over the course of a single weekend, that had convinced his wife to leave him forever, just one year prior to his fatal crash. Which was how he came to service a scruffy, no-name airport in Tahiti, shuttling tourists twice a week to the Marquesas. The eight-hundred-mile flight was a breeze, and given the intervals between each leg, he generally had the freedom to enjoy as much Tanduay as he liked, so long as he could slog through his hangover, throw on a pair of mirrored sunglasses to hide his bloodshot eyes, and make his way woozily down to the hangar.

Naturally, such a boozy existence gave rise to a fair amount of unadvisable liberties. Airport regulations demanded that Marco leave a detailed manifest before each trip, but he seldom complied. Control tower etiquette mandated that he keep in regular contact throughout the course of the flight, but he almost never did. Indeed, Marco wasn’t even above dozing off behind the stick when his hangovers called for it. The compass beeped if he went off course, and the altimeter buzzed when he got too low—what could possibly go wrong?

Well, as it turned out, much to the detriment of those on board that fateful morning, quite a bit could go wrong. Marco’s hangover from the night before was otherworldly. It had been his and his ex-wife’s anniversary, and he had spent it alone at a dingy bar in Papeete, downing shot after shot of clear, unaged Tanduay, doing precisely that which had convinced her to leave him in the first place. And when his clock radio prodded him awake at eight o’clock the next morning, he was still reekingly, staggeringly drunk. But it wasn’t the first time he had walked the half mile to the airstrip loaded, nor did he think—although he was sorely mistaken—that it would be his last. Shielded behind his mirrored aviators, he trudged into the hangar, waving at the mechanics as he yanked his keys off the upturned gutter nail from which they were hung. Marco glanced quickly at a clipboarded manifest, reading off the names of his passengers: two French and one American. Perfecto. He choked back five ibuprofen tablets from his locker, downed them with a swig of Tanduay from a half-pint he kept there for just such an occasion, and climbed into the cockpit of his trusty Cessna 208. The mechanic gave him a thumbs-up, and Marco, donning his earphones and adjusting his mouthpiece, gave him a healthy dose of thumb in return. Time to pick up the passengers, who, if able to distinguish between the Tanduay and the gas fumes that filled the airplane, said nothing.

The first half of the four-hour flight had gone seamlessly as planned. The American stared out the window in amazed bewilderment, the French couple was all smiles and hand squeezes, and the skies were clear and . . .

Well, not that clear. Snoring awake from one of his infamous micronaps, Marco took note of something ahead: A bank of clouds, dark and foreboding, loomed before them. It wasn’t unusual at that time of year to encounter a stormy patch, and Marco’s usual strategy was simply to fly around it. It could add twenty or thirty minutes to the trip, but it was better than turning back and wasting the entire day, as traffic control generally suggested. Which was precisely why he seldom informed them of his little detours.

By the time Marco executed his slow, droning roll, raindrops were already flecking the windshield, squirming their way across the glass. He considered turning on his radio and asking for some information on the storm’s size, but with his head a-throb and guts a-churn, he was in no mood to have some pissy traffic controller demand he turn the craft around. No, Marco would continue on his way, skirting the storm’s dark margins, waiting patiently for the skies to clear.

Only they didn’t. Because the small patch of storm clouds Marco was intent upon circumventing was nothing of the sort—a fact he did not know, because he had been too hung over to bother checking the morning’s weather report. Its black curtain hung for miles, hiving from within with flares of orange-and-purple lightning. And more pressing than that, after spending two hours trying to flank it, his weak-winged little craft was running dangerously low on fuel. Gulping back down his Adam’s apple and wiping with a shaky arm the sweat from his brow, Marco realized that he had no choice. He did not have enough gas either to fly around it or to turn back. His only chance was to fly straight through it.

At which point Marco should have radioed back to Tahiti with his position and begged feverishly for help or at the very least advice—a precautionary measure he refused to take. After having lost two decent pilot gigs and a wife to the good folks at Tanduay, he was in no hurry to lose anything else. No, he could make it, he told himself in Chavacano, the Castilian-inflected dialect of his native Zamboanga back in the Philippines. A few bumpy minutes would pass, and then they would burst triumphantly on through to clear, sunny skies. It simply had to be so.

And the truly amazing part—Marco “Ding Dong” Mercado’s plan went almost exactly as planned. He shouted back to his three passengers that there would be some turbulence ahead and that they ought to fasten their seat belts. He bit his lip and righted the stick. He muttered a quick prayer to the benevolent Pilar, patron saint of Zamboanga, whose beatific face graced a paper card he had taped to the dashboard, and he plunged the little craft headfirst into the storm.

Oh, it was bumpy all right. A series of nauseating dips and teeth-grating climbs, shaking that nearly wrenched the shoulders. Some of the overhead luggage spilled out of the compartments; a bag of contact lens supplies skittered down the aisle. The French girl hid her head in her husband’s shoulder, and the American in the strange office clothes turned a legitimate shade of maritime green. “Por favor, Pilar,” Marco muttered aloud in his desperate Chavacano. “Grant me this one favor, and I will give up drinking for good—I’ll be a better person, I’ll even try to get my wife back. I’ll never touch the bottle again.” And it appeared that the forgiving Pilar actually listened; up ahead, a break appeared in the clouds. The fierce bumps shrank to gentle nudges. A great wash of apricot sunlight illuminated the path that had been laid out before them. “Ay, gracias, Pilar. Thank you, thank you, thank you.” In fact, so grateful was Marco, he decided right then and there to honor her kindness with a fresh bottle of Tanduay as soon as he got—

And then the lightning struck. Like a megawatt hand swatting an escaping fly, that great arc of electricity reached out from the storm clouds just as Marco, Étienne, Sophie, and Barry were on the verge of leaving them behind forever. They had almost cleared their pitch-black hurdle and made the lemon-drop safety of the open sky beyond—almost, but not quite. The bolt deafened all aboard for a bright white moment and left a taste like tinfoil ringing in their mouths. When the electric fog cleared, Marco, Étienne, Sophie, and Barry all came to the horrifying realization that not only was the plane’s single engine aflame and its radio circuitry kaput, but they were also pitched and falling at a death-dealing angle. And to make matters worse, the bolt’s electric fangs had taken a smoldering bite of the plane’s left wing. No gentle glides, no stone-skip landings. Instead, the most horrific, spiraling, downward trajectory a human being can imagine, with nothing but a carbon-hard sea rising to meet them and a fading drone to serve as their dirge.

Sadly, Marco “Ding Dong” Mercado died upon impact. The sheer force of the collision between plane and sea ripped his seat from the floor and crushed his body against the dashboard. His corpse was thrown in the tumult far from the rest of the wreckage, where it sank beneath the waves and into Pilar’s benevolent embrace.

Étienne was the unfortunate recipient of the twisted steel bottom of the pilot’s seat—when it pitched forward, it also scythed upward, nearly severing one of his legs and gouging out a chunk of his side.

Sophie was spared a similar fate by inches; the same jagged steel that cut through his organs only narrowly missed her throat. She suffered a mild concussion, and somehow lost her shirt, but was relatively unhurt when her mortally wounded Étienne unbuckled his belt and tumbled forward into the water. She went in after him, screaming his name.

As for Barry, he and his seat had both been sucked backward when the plane’s tail exploded around him. He was treated to a series of disorienting reverse somersaults through the water before he regained some sense of up, unlatched his seat belt, and began swimming toward it.

None of this should be especially surprising given what has already been disclosed about Barry and Sophie’s predicament. But it does explain why the rescue that they craved was at first slow—and then utterly absent—in coming. Marco, in his poor and Tanduay-warped judgment, had piloted them almost three hundred miles off course in his vain attempt at besting the storm.

And nobody—barring Barry, Sophie, and the benevolent Pilar, patron saint of Zamboanga—had the slightest inkling of this fact.